Life & Mortality Quote by Irvin S. Cobb

A eulogy, Cobb suggests, is less a hymn than a courtroom maneuver staged when the verdict can no longer change. The line lands because it swaps the soft-focus language we expect at funerals for the hard lighting of legal procedure: “plea,” “defense,” “evidence.” In one brisk metaphor, grief becomes advocacy and memory becomes selective testimony. It’s funny in that dry, journalistic way that refuses to pretend we’re all saints just because we’ve gone quiet.

The specific intent is twofold. Cobb punctures sentimental ritual - the comforting fiction that a eulogy “captures a life” - and he exposes its real function: reputation management. We don’t speak well of the dead simply out of kindness; we do it to stabilize the social story, to sand down the rough parts that might complicate mourning. The “belated” is the knife: praise arrives only when the subject can’t rebut it, can’t confess, can’t change, can’t disappoint again. Death freezes the record, and only then do we mount the defense.

The subtext is that a life is always on trial in public, assessed in anecdotes and side glances long before any funeral. By the time the minister or friend steps up, “the evidence is all in” - the failures remembered, the grudges filed, the private contradictions already weighed. Cobb wrote as a journalist in an era that prized public persona and newspaper-fed notoriety; he’d seen how quickly narrative hardens. The eulogy, in his telling, isn’t truth-telling. It’s closing arguments, delivered to the living, for the sake of the living.